Today seems to be Disney day, as without exception all of the releases worth mentioning are coming from Disney.
To start we have the Blu-ray/DVD combo 4 pack of Fantasia and Fantasia 2000. Fantasia was a movie whose brilliance I didn’t understand as a child, I only knew that I liked the vague memories I had of it. Watching it again on Blu-ray I was actually impressed by it’s brilliance and how far ahead of its time it was, and the purpose of it. Watching it again, I was completely enamored by the concept and I hope that Disney does more like this.
The film opens up with an orchestra assembling in that beautiful world of 1940 Technicolor (which looks utterly amazing in Blu-ray) and a narrator steps out and explains the concept. Fantasia is different artists renditions of their impressions of music. An orchestra is employed to simulate the experience of going to the symphony and that’s really what the movie is all about. You’re going to the symphony and watching different artists interpret the movements of the music. Sometimes it tells a story and sometimes it doesn’t. I watched this with my kids and they were enamored by it, wanting to go to more symphonies if possible. (They’ve been to a couple and they love silent films, so maybe they’re exceptions to the rule).
It makes me sad to see that Disney only attempted to use this formula once more and it was in 2000’s sequel. It’s good, too, and also looks gorgeous in full 1080. But this kind of film is perfect for kids of today. It forces them to just sit and pay attention to beautiful music and imagery and hopefully get them to foster a healthy respect for classical music and art.
Another thing I was surprised by was that one of the pieces of music was set to imagery that showed the Big Bang Theory and single-celled organisms and their evolution into dinosaurs and the extinction of the dinosaurs. The narrator, Deems Taylor, explained evolution and the Big Bang as both science and fact. The fact that this wasn’t controversial in 1940, but would be unthinkable in today’s charged climate shows how far we’ve slid away from sense and reason in today’s world. I mean, consider that… What would happen if a Disney cartoon appeared today and talked about evolution as fact so casually? There would be riots in the street.
I would recommend this film to any music lover, lover of animation, or film buff. The animation and colors hold up strikingly and I want desperately to see Disney embark on more experiments of this nature.
Instead of experiments like that, Disney gave us another film out today, a live action adaptation of the silent piece in the original Fantasia, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, starring Jay Baruchel and Nicolas Cage. I haven’t seen it yet and have been told it’s much, much better than I’m expecting, but I just wanted to throw that out there.
The next three Disney releases today are documentaries that I’ve been dying to see and will now have a chance to. The first is Waking Sleeping Beauty, which tells the tale of the rebirth of Disney Animation in the 1980s. You can watch The Big Movie Mouth-Off review of that film “>here.
The next is Walt and El Grupo, which tells the tale of Walt Disney’s sojourn to South America with a group of animators. The thing is, they were asked to go by the government on the outset of World War II to act as cultural spies. Two great pieces of Disney history came out of the trip, including The Three Cabelleros, making this a fascinating documentary.
The third is the tumultuous story of The Boys. This documentary tells the story of The Sherman Brothers and their rifts through creative life. Maybe you haven’t heard of them specifically, but you’ve heard their music. They wrote “Supercalifragilisticexpealadocious”, the Jungle Book’s “I wanna be like you”, “It’s a Small World” and more.
Disney is coming back to their roots with documentary programming that is compelling and it’s great to see them back in form across the board. Between this and Tangled’s release in theatres last week, they’re on a roll.
And I would be remiss in being a Star Wars fan if I didn’t mention that Vampires Suck came out today. It stars The Clone Wars’ Anakin Skywalker, Matt Lanter in an Edward Cullen sort of role.